Knowing Dashrath: An anatomy of how we remember an artist – By Joyona Medhi

I am no connoisseur of art. Neither do I claim to make any head or tail out of abstract art. However it is interesting to know how I happened to chance upon the legendary Dashrath Patel, one fine evening after having received a mail comprising of the list of 10 abstract artists our Magazine was planning to throw the limelight on, this issue. Me and an independent photographer friend of mine who swears by works of the pioneering photography collective of Magnum, began doing a basic web search of each of the ten till we found relatability, a banal one albeit, for the naked common eye. It was a captivating photograph titled The Aerial View of the Sabarmati River, that held us from scrolling down further, sitting on the screen in front of our eyes in all its red and saffron glory. It was at that moment that I’d taken my pick of which among the ten would I try and get to know in the course of my penning down of this piece. A lot has been written about ‘Design Dada’ as he was commonly referred to in artist circles, and there is absolutely nothing more that I, who was only a few articles old into the world of paint, could add to the oeuvre of the works of such a great man. But what I can do is to nurture a common visual line of sight that I see between the unknown photographer in him, one which is seldom ever spoken about, and my obsession with the medium of the camera, especially the doing of the mischievous ones behind it. This article is solely about the journey of getting to know the painter who was secretly a photographer. It is uncanny that in this exact moment I chance upon a snippet of text in miniature font beside a photograph of his:

“In my first art show in Gallery Barbizon in Paris in 1952, a gentleman walked in with a Leica M3 hanging like a necklace around his neck. After seeing my exhibition he asked me if I took pictures. I told him that I did not like photography.” He said “you see well, i can show you how to use my camera”. “I agreed and did exactly what he had suggested. A fortnight later he invited me to his house for dinner to meet his wife who had studied Bharat Natyam in India. That evening awakened my interest in photography and also started a fifty year friendship with a legend called Henri Cartier Bresson.” How very strange is my previously mentioned Magnum reference now?

Talking about the “decisive moment”, a much acclaimed phrase associated with Bresson and subsequently Magnum, I guess Patel’s came when he designed stage sets and captured innumerable shots of his soul mate and renowned dancer, Chandralekha’s performances. This was when she returned to the world of dance from the fields of graphic arts and writing. Imbibing the unobtrusive qualities of the Leica camera, Patel clicked as the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’, from corners in rooms. There are intimate glimpses of artists in Green Rooms as they prepare and practice last-minute, right before shows. As a student of his in Exhibition Design from NID Ahmadabad, Lolita Dutta very aptly puts it, “Dashrath had an innate sense of design. Having imbibed a design vocabulary from legendary practitioners like designer Charles Eames, inventor Buckminster Fuller, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, architect Louis Khan, and furniture designer George Nakashima among others, he exhibited his own uniqueness in all that he did. The inspiration from his gorgeous collection of saris, kites and textiles and his use of colour, form, texture and space manifested itself in the many palettes he worked with.”

Reminding me a lot of well known scientist and even more renowned teacher Richard Fennyman, Lolita goes on to throw light on Dashrath as a mentor. “He did not follow any regime or structure of teaching. His philosophy was simple – look around you; the answers are all there, permeated in our lifestyle, our culture, our origins and our immediate surroundings. His idea of imparting a lesson often meant taking some of us on excursions to remote villages in Gujarat to look at mica mines, to watch ‘Bhavai’ folk theatre performances, to imbibe something from local street vendors and hawkers.”
It is here that I’d like to bring up a very similar advice that is given to practically every photographer looking to make a name, a legacy for him or herself through nomination by esteemed institutions and press awards and galleries and grants, – “Take from your surroundings, your context, your time period, and tell your story!” This leads me to the question which has been debated to the core by photography enthusiasts alike, “is it about the issue the picture is trying to represent or is it about the photographer?” I like to believe it’s the edit. A line of sight, a play with light and colour, logic only the eye behind the lens dictates irrespective of words and content and intent and ethics, which distinguish a good photograph from a bad one. Bresson saw an understanding of this in Patel’s paintings. Painting preceded photography, and it saw the latter as an absolute sell out to reproduction, due to the involvement of negative and prints and reprints. This went against the one copy only policy of painting which almost always placed the artist in such high regard. Photography was according to painters was just knowing how to operate a machine. But Dashrath Patel made a painting out of the viewfinder itself. It is almost surreal that the eleven friends of Dashrath, who have been behind these efforts to remember his photography in his anniversary, are also screening an engaging documentary by Iffat Fatima on the life of Patel, called “In the Realm of the Visual.” There couldn’t be a more apt name.

Freedom according to him, many say was essential to creativity. I think it is with this philosophy he moved so graciously across mediums. Artists like Patel are the keys to reminding us not so much about function, not so much about content but to a large scale, the beauty of experimenting with form.

They say you are what you are remembered by. And for an artist, especially a photographer, the ‘image of you’ going around in artist circles by word of mouth and nowadays social media, are what legacies are made of. Robin Sharma’s ‘Who will cry when I die’ finds personification in the life of an artist. It is fair to say that Dashrath Patel had many circles of appreciation. And it is in their mourning and odes and tributes and anniversary exhibitions, which I have gotten to, know of the artist Dashrath Patel. In here is the artist’s biggest achievement. Letting his actions, his behavior, his sense of style, his vision and his body of work, speak for the Dashrath Patel universe, or multiverse more likely, they originate from. This is exactly the reason I am still a strong voucher of Rowling’s Harry Potter, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Weinstein’s Miramax and Louis CK’s stand up theatre bits, irrespective of what their creators are up to in their personal lives. I believe in the world of Dashrath Patel, they way he saw Gandhi, and Nehru and subsequently India, the way he saw colour, just like I believe in the worlds/multiverse of the above mentioned guys. They speak for themselves.

Similarly Sunil Kumar, a close personal aide from this universe of Patel’s, writes, “Born in Sojitra, Nadiad District in Gujarat in 1927 in a Patel family, he did not go into business as Patels do. He decided to be a painter. His parents relented and allowed him to do what he wished. Being an artist, he got rare opportunities to interact with designers like Charles Eames, and ‘Avant- guarde’ musicians like John Cage, architects like Louise Kahn and Frie Otto and engraver William Hayter, to name a few luminaries. Henri Cartier Bresson, whenever he visited India and Ahmadabad, stayed with Dashrath. When he came in 1970 to Ahmadabad, I was staying with Chandra at Dashrath residence in Ahmadabad. I met Cartier Bresson and I could see that he and Dashrath were ‘great buddies.’ Cartier was very fond of Chandra and has taken several photographs of hers. Dashrath, Chandra and Cartier admired each other’s work.”

“I had also seen him once at Bhulabhai Memorial Institute at Mumbai where Gaitonde, Ambalal, Tyab Mehta, Hussain and other painters were using the studio at a rent of rupee one per day! Bhulabhai Memorial Institute was the hub of painters, musicians, dancers, photographers, and artists. Soli Batliwala, the trustee, looked after all of them. Madhuriben, widow of Bhulabhai Desai, was a gracious host and welcomed artists with warmth and affection. We all were indulged by ‘Solimama’ as he was known. He was fond of Chandra and Dashrath. I remember Solimama once told me that Dashrath had returned from Paris after a very successful exhibition and Picasso had gone to see his show and admired Dashrath’s work. Very few know this.”

Sadanand Menon, the third gem in the tight trio of Chandra and Dashrath, has written in his tribute to Dashrath in Frontline Magazine: ‘On the morning of December 1, 2010, Dashrath Patel sat on his chair by the window in his home, gripped his thick-nibbed bamboo pen, dipped it first into the black inkpot and then into red, placed the tip on the open page of his note book and let the play of light guide his wrist. There was a surge of flowing lines. He had whipped up a whirlwind. He kept his bamboo pen aside and gently picked up the long, sturdy pea-hen feather I had found for him, a few days ago, in the campus of the Sarabhai Foundation in Ahmadabad. He had sliced the tip to a thin point and was using it as his quill. Once again he mixed the inks and let the feather give wings to his imagination. Three more pages of abstract forms flew out from within the infinite resource of fantasy he was blessed with…His hands would quiver if he had to sign a cheque. But when he was drawing it was like a musician catching his sruti. The creator and his creation aligned on the same axis.”

Talking about remembrances’ of the legend that was, and I haven’t even mentioned the Padma Bhushan among the long list of accolades, there is no better insight into the visual acumen of Dashrath Patel that the catalogue made by Sadanand on the exhibition of his photo book taking inspiration from a lecture of Nobel laureate scientist CV Raman titled ‘Why Is The Sky Blue?’, with notes by Chandra. It was a joint effort by the trio but to seek to capture the origin of the pigment blue, was a fitting accompaniment to the questions raised by Raman in the fascinating lecture they were fortunate enough to be invited to by a student. It is nice to remember him by that catalogue, an archival piece from the Dashrath Patel universe.

He is believed to have been usually seen in khadi and crisp cotton wear. As someone who had aligned himself with the national design project of India post independence, it is what I picture him in. He was a man of his times. I have also had little birdies tell me that Dashrath could be heard saying exasperatedly: “The Indian industrial class lacks both dignity and courage. They are just sons of merchants, conservative to the core. Their sole interest is gathering profit without investing in the future of the industry in product, process or human development.’

Without further getting sucked into the Dashrath Patel universe of friends, well wishers, eavesdroppers, students and personal aides, we should take a step back and let his work parallel speak for itself. Coming back to The Aerial View of the Sabarmati River, one can go a step further to say that it was way ahead of his time finding equivalence in drone shots people take nowadays. Many of his colours by the ghats remind one of Raghu Rai who came into the sixties with an aesthetic on rural India much later, if not as a contemporary. Patel’s portrait of a sage by the ghats is again of him putting makeup and not as an exotic being from an exotic India.

Thus one can surmise that both in terms of his vision reflecting in his masterpieces and in his secret box of photographs, and in terms of what people have written, heard, seen and spoken of him, the tale of Dashrath Patel lives on. He was one of our nation firsts, in the way that he saw, and communicated it to the closest around him to collaborate with and create something larger than life itself. I’m glad that in the short life span that I have lived in comparison to an artist who legacy spans decades, I have been fortunate enough to get to know the life and works of Dashrath Patel.

Photo Courtesy : Getty Image and Sashrath Patel Museum.